Barely 5 million people on earth spoke English (a rough estimate; no one tried to count the population of England, Scotland, or Ireland until 1801). Barely a million of those could write. Of all the world’s languages English was already the most checkered, the most mottled, the most polygenetic. Its history showed continual corruption and enrichment from without. Its oldest core words, the words that felt most basic, came from the language spoken by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, Germanic tribes that crossed the North Sea into England in the fifth century, pushing aside the Celtic inhabitants. Not much of Celtic penetrated the Anglo-Saxon speech, but Viking invaders brought more words from Norse and Danish: egg, sky, anger, give, get. Latin came by way of Christian missionaries; they wrote in the alphabet of the Romans, which replaced the runic scripts that spread in central and northern Europe early in the first millennium. Then came the influence of French.
Influence, to Robert Cawdrey, meant “a flowing in.” The Norman Conquest was more like a deluge, linguistically. English peasants of the lower classes continued to breed cows, pigs, and oxen (Germanic words), but in the second millennium the upper classes dined on beef, pork, and mutton (French). By medieval times French and Latin roots accounted for more than half of the common vocabulary. More alien words came when intellectuals began consciously to borrow from Latin and Greek to express concepts the language had not before needed. Cawdrey found this habit irritating. “Some men seek so far for outlandish English, that they forget altogether their mothers language, so that if some of their mothers were alive, they were not able to tell, or understand what they say,” he complained. “One might well charge them, for counterfeyting the Kings English.”
Four hundred years after Cawdrey published his book of words, John Simpson retraced Cawdrey’s path. Simpson was in certain respects his natural heir: the editor of a grander book of words, the Oxford English Dictionary. Simpson, a pale, soft-spoken man, saw Cawdrey as obstinate, uncompromising, and even pugnacious. The schoolteacher was ordained a deacon and then a priest of the Church of England in a restless time, when Puritanism was on the rise. Nonconformity led him into trouble. He seems to have been guilty of “not Conforming himself” to some of the sacraments, such as “the Cross in Baptism, and the Ring in Marriage.” As a village priest he did not care to bow down to bishops and archbishops. He preached a form of equality unwelcome to church authorities. “There was preferred secretly an Information against him for speaking diverse Words in the Pulpit, tending to the depraving of the Book of Common Prayer. . . . And so being judged a dangerous Person, if he should continue preaching, but infecting the People with Principles different from the Religion established.” Cawdrey was degraded from the priesthood and deprived of his benefice. He continued to fight the case for years, to no avail.
All that time, he collected words (“collect, gather”). He published two instructional treatises, one on catechism (“catechiser, that teacheth the principles of Christian religion”) and one on A godlie forme of householde government for the ordering of private families, and in 1604 he produced a different sort of book: nothing more than a list of words, with brief definitions.
Why? Simpson says, “We have already seen that he was committed to simplicity in language, and that he was strong-minded to the point of obstinacy.” He was still preaching—now, to preachers. “Such as by their place and calling (but especially Preachers) as have occasion to speak publiquely before the ignorant people,” Cawdrey declared in his introductory note, “are to bee admonished.” He admonishes them. “Never affect any strange ynckhorne termes.” (An inkhorn was an inkpot; by inkhorn term he meant a bookish word.) “Labour to speake so as is commonly received, and so as the most ignorant may well understand them.” And above all do not affect to speak like a foreigner:
Some far journied gentlemen, at their returne home, like as they love to go in forraine apparrell, so they will pouder their talke with over-sea language. He that commeth lately out of France, will talk French English, and never blush at the matter.
Cawdrey had no idea of listing all the words—whatever that would mean. By 1604 William Shakespeare had written most of his plays, employing a vocabulary of nearly 30,000, but these words were not available to Cawdrey or anyone else. Cawdrey did not bother with the most common words, nor the most inkhorn and Frenchified words; he listed only the “hard usual” words, words difficult enough to need some explanation but still “proper unto the tongue wherein we speake” and “plaine for all men to perceive.” He compiled 2,500. He knew that many were derived from Greek, French, and Latin (“derive, fetch from”), and he marked these accordingly. The book Cawdrey made was the first English dictionary. The word dictionary was not in it.
Although Cawdrey cited no authorities, he had relied on some. He copied the remarks about inkhorn terms and the far-journeyed gentlemen in their foreign apparel from Thomas Wilson’s successful book The Arte of Rhetorique. For the words themselves he found several sources (“source, wave, or issuing foorth of water”). He found about half his words in a primer for teaching reading, called The English Schoolemaister, by Edmund Coote, first published in 1596 and widely reprinted thereafter. Coote claimed that a schoolmaster could teach a hundred students more quickly with his text than forty without it. He found it worthwhile to explain the benefits of teaching people to read: “So more knowledge will be brought into this Land, and moe bookes bought, than otherwise would have been.” Coote included a long glossary, which Cawdrey plundered.
That Cawdrey should arrange his words in alphabetical order, to make his Table Alphabeticall, was not self-evident. He knew he could not count on even his educated readers to be versed in alphabetical order, so he tried to produce a small how-to manual. He struggled with this: whether to describe the ordering in logical, schematic terms or in terms of a step-by-step procedure, an algorithm. “Gentle reader,” he wrote—again adapting freely from Coote—
thou must learne the Alphabet, to wit, the order of the Letters as they stand, perfectly without booke, and where every Letter standeth: as b neere the beginning, n about the middest, and t toward the end. Nowe if the word, which thou art desirous to finde, begin with a then looke in the beginning of this Table, but if with v looke towards the end. Againe, if thy word beginne with ca looke in the beginning of the letter c but if with cu then looke toward the end of that letter. And so of all the rest. &c.
It was not easy to explain. Friar Johannes Balbus of Genoa tried in his 1286 Catholicon. Balbus thought he was inventing alphabetical order for the first time, and his instructions were painstaking: “For example I intend to discuss amo and bibo. I will discuss amo before bibo because a is the first letter of amo and b is the first letter of bibo and a is before b in the alphabet. Similarly . . .” He rehearsed a long list of examples and concluded: “I beg of you, therefore, good reader, do not scorn this great labor of mine and this order as something worthless.”
In the ancient world, alphabetical lists scarcely appeared until around 250 BCE, in papyrus texts from Alexandria. The great library there seems to have used at least some alphabetization in organizing its books. The need for such an artificial ordering scheme arises only with large collections of data, not otherwise ordered. And the possibility of alphabetical order arises only in languages possessing an alphabet: a discrete small symbol set with its own conventional sequence (“abecedarie, the order of the Letters, or hee that useth them”). Even then the system is unnatural. It forces the user to detach information from meaning; to treat words strictly as character strings; to focus abstractly on the configuration of the word. Furthermore, alphabetical ordering comprises a pair of procedures, one the inverse of the other: organizing a list and looking up items; sorting and searching. In either direction the procedure is recursive (“recourse, a running backe againe”). The basic operation is a binary decision: greater than or less than. This operation is performed first on one letter; then, nested as a subroutine, on the next letter; and (as Cawdrey put it, struggling with the awkwardness) “so of all the rest. &c.” This makes for astounding efficiency. The system